By Jordan Vega · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, August 2012
In mid-August 2012, FishbowlLA marked the 2012 Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards by spotlighting the winning investigative work — the Wi-Fi-hacking, small-claims-scamming, and HACLA-spending reports that took prizes. The original framing argued that the investigative categories were the best way to gauge the breadth and depth of the LA-region television news of that year.
Then
The Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards were — and are — the regional-Emmy program recognizing LA-market television. The 2012 ceremony recognized work across LA’s local-television news operations, including the major broadcast stations and KCET’s SoCal Connected public-affairs documentary series.
Ana Garcia and Marc Brown were among the LA-local-TV figures connected to the 2012 honorees — Garcia with her NBC LA investigative-series work, Brown as one of the LA-region’s anchor television-news figures. The FishbowlLA framing’s choice to foreground the investigative winners — pieces on Wi-Fi hacking, small-claims-court scams, and Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) spending — was a deliberate editorial statement: that the substantive accountability journalism was the part of LA local TV worth celebrating.
Richard Horgan’s framing pushed readers to actually watch the winning investigative pieces rather than just scan the winners list.
Now
The Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards have continued as the annual LA-market regional-Emmy program. The investigative-journalism categories the 2012 piece foregrounded have continued to be recognized, though the broader LA-local-TV-news investigative-reporting capacity has faced the same staffing pressures as the rest of the local-news industry.
KCET’s SoCal Connected — the public-affairs documentary series that was one of the recurring LA Area Emmy contenders — continued through subsequent years before the broader KCET reorganization (the 2017 PBS reaffiliation and the 2018 PBS SoCal merger). Ana Garcia and Marc Brown both continued in LA-region broadcast journalism across the years.
The broader category of LA-local-TV investigative reporting — the Wi-Fi-hacking-and-HACLA-spending kind of accountability work the 2012 piece celebrated — has continued to be produced, though the structural staffing of local-TV investigative units has thinned across the post-2012 interval.
The 2012 piece reads now as a small documented moment of LA-local-TV-news recognition — a regional-Emmy roundup that deliberately foregrounded the investigative journalism as the genre’s most-worthwhile output.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.